Subject: Re: Slow 486 seems really slow
To: Frederick Bruckman <fb@enteract.com>
From: Jonathan R. Hinds <jon@fork.yi.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 02/14/2000 00:51:24
On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> My 486dx4 compiles a custom kernel in about 30 minutes, generic in
> about 45. I don't think you fried the chip, either. I have fried
> chips--they smoke, and leave burn scars in the socket, and then the
> machine doesn't boot.
> 
> Does the hard drive probe as supporting DMA ("grep ^wd
> /var/run/dmesg.boog")? If not, if you're stuck at PIO mode 0, say,
> swapping is going to be incredibly slow. You might see a huge
> performance boost with a different hard drive, or even by fiddling
> with the flags for wdc* and wd* in the kernel config file, per the
> comments in .../i386/conf/GENERIC.

dmesg says the follow about the controller and hard drive:

wdc0 at isa0 port 0x1f0-0x1f7 irq 14
wd0 at wdc0 channel 0 drive 0: <QUANTUM FIREBALL1280A>
wd0: drive supports 8-sector pio transfers, lba addressing
wd0: 1222MB, 2484 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 2503872 sectors
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2

Does this mean that it is using DMA? I guess that I will try another hard
drive and see what happens.

--jon